Marian congregations: a young, enthusiastic force, firm in its principles
The religious climate in the Brazil of the Twenties was still imbued with the profound and beneficial action of the pontificate of St Pius X.1 The struggle against modernism promoted by this Pope had brought, at least on the surface, internal peace to the Catholic Church, which appeared as a great force united around the Pope and his bishops. On 11 December 1905, St Pius X nominated the first Latin American cardinal in the person of the Brazilian Archbishop Joaquim Arcoverde de Albuquerque Cavalcanti.2 Cardinal Arcoverde, who since 1897 had been the bishop of Rio de Janeiro, strove to instil new energy into the Catholicism of his country. However after 1921 his health suffered a noticeable decline and he was assisted more and more by his auxiliary Sebastião Leme da Silveira Cintra3 who, at his death in 1930, succeeded him, thus becoming one of the youngest cardinals of the Sacred College.
Brazil at the beginning of the Twenties witnessed a reactionary movement to the prevailing positivism. It was spectacularly demonstrated in the conversion to Catholicism of Jackson de Figuereido.4 A young intellectual, he founded, in 1921 in Rio de Janeiro, with the support of the auxiliary Bishop Leme, the magazine A Ordem and in 1922 the Dom Vital Centre. The very choice of the name of Bishop Vital Maria Gonçalves de Oliveira (Dom Vital)5, the great “Brazilian Athanasius”,6 bore witness to Jackson’s position, who openly defined himself as a reactionary and ultramontane. The characteristic trait of his apostolate was, as Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira himself noted, “his absolutely clear notion that the great religious problem of Brazil was essentially the fight against the general indifferentism”.7 He was to recall:
“Brazil never crossed a more asphyxiating phase, from a spiritual, moral and intellectual viewpoint, than the long years of stagnation that preceded Jackson’s apostolate…. It was in this panorama that Jackson appeared. And he appeared with the providential mission of dynamiting the grey and shapeless quarry of the unconcern of the environment. He planted the seeds of concern and struggle, in the lethal and shameful placidity of the Brazil of the time…. Jackson, in the amorphism of the society of the day, was a loud and epic defender of the rights of the Church…. Jackson’s apostolate echoed throughout Brazil, and from north to south, from the depths of the interior to the Atlantic, souls upon souls, forming legions and multitudes, hurried to gather under the authentically and exclusively Catholic banner this great paladin had raised.”8
Between 1925 and 1930 the Catholic movement in Brazil included all the various groups and religious associations spread throughout the country and throughout all the social classes. It had an extraordinary impulse, encouraging entire legions of young people to develop an interior life and the apostolate. The backbone of this fruitful Catholic movement in Brazil was the Marian Congregations.9
At the beginning of the 1930s, the “Marian movement” was noticeable for the extent of its influence and the intensity of its enthusiasm. Together with Cardinal Leme, it was particularly encouraged by another great person of the day: Duarte Leopoldo e Silva,10 Metropolitan Archbishop of São Paulo, a grave and austere figure, who guided the archdiocese for thirty years.
Announcement of the Catholic Youth Congress from 9 to 16 September 1928, posted in Praça do Patriarca, in the capital of São Paulo.
Crossing the city centre in a tram, the young Plinio saw the announcement of a congress of the Catholic Youth to be held in São Paulo from 9 to 16 September 1928. For him this was the discovery of a world whose existence he had never even imagined. The Congress took place in an atmosphere of great enthusiasm in the historic church-monastery of São Bento, in the presence of the new papal nuncio, Archbishop Benedetto Aloisi Masella.11 Already a Marian Congregation member in São Luiz, Plinio then entered that of the Legion of St. Peter, attached to the parish of St. Cecília, where he found the ideal of dedication to which he deeply aspired. The Congregation, founded on 26 December 1926 by Mgr Marcondes Pedrosa12, the parish priest, and placed under the protection of the Annunciation, had a newsletter entitled O Legionário. Its Congregation members numbered as many as one hundred.
The beginning of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s public activity dates from this period, when, within the Law School of the University of São Paulo, then the centre of secularism and of legal and political positivism, he founded, with a handful of young Marian Congregation members, the University Catholic Action (AUC). On the occasion of the graduation ceremony, he dared to do something that until then had never taken place in a state university in Brazil. He had the Mass, which traditionally concluded the higher course of studies, celebrated, not in the church of St Francis next to the University, but inside the University itself, in the internal courtyard. The celebrant was the Vicar-General of the Diocese, Mgr Gastão Liberal Pinto and the sermon was preached by Father Leonel Franca of the Society of Jesus.13 When, on 11 December 1930, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira graduated in Law, his name was already “very well-known and admired among Brazilian Catholic youth”.14 From then he began to be known among his friends as “Doctor Plinio”.15
Notes:
1. Under St Pius X, religious life in Brazil received a great boost. During his pontificate, he increased the archdioceses from two to seven, four nullius prelacies and three apostolic prefectures. Manoel Alvarenga, O Episcopado Brasileiro, (São Paulo, A. Campos, 1915), pp. 11, 94-5.
2. Joaquim Arcoverde de Albuquerque Cavalcanti was born on 17 January 1850 in Pernambuco and was ordained to the priesthood on 4 April 1874. In 1890 he was appointed Bishop of Goiás and was consecrated in Rome. He was bishop of São Paulo from 1894 to 1897, succeeding Bishop Lino Deodato de Carvalho, and then became archbishop of Rio de Janeiro until his death on 18 April 1930. “This prince of the Church, the first Brazilian and Latin-American cardinal, besides having native blood (Arcoverde) and the Portuguese blood of the Albuquerques, also had Italian blood, indeed very Italian blood, in the cultural sense of the word, of the Cavalcantis of the sixteenth century”. G. Freyre, Casa-Grande & Senzala. Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime de Economia Patriarcal, Rio de Janeiro, Livraria José Olympio, 1958; It. tr. Padroni e schiavi. La formazione della famiglia brasiliana in regime di economia patriarcale, (Turin, Giulio Einaudi, 1965), p. XIII.
3. Sebastião Leme da Silveira Cintra was born in Espírito Santo do Pinhal, in the state of São Paulo, on 20 January Having completed his studies in Rome in the Pio Latin-American College and the Gregorian University, he was ordained to the priesthood in the Eternal City on 28 October 1904. He was then transferred to São Paulo as an assistant in the parish of St Cecilia, and appointed director of the Boletim Eclesiástico. He was also a leading figure in the Confederação Católica, a body destined to co-ordinate all the associations of Catholic action within the diocese. On 4 January 1911 he was consecrated bishop of Ortósia, in the same chapel of the Latin-American College where he had been ordained a priest, and was appointed to the diocese of Rio de Janeiro, as auxiliary bishop to Cardinal Arcoverde, at the suggestion of the latte. In April 1916, he was appointed to the diocese of Olinda (which two years later became the archdiocese of Olinda and Recife). In 1921, because of the serious condition of Cardinal Arcoverde’s health, he was nominated coadjutor archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, with the right to succession. On the death of Cardinal Arcoverde, in April 1930, he was raised in his turn to archbishop of the Diocese and then a cardinal. He died on 17 October 1942 in Rio de Janeiro. A not exhaustive biography is that of Irmã Maria Regina do Santo Rosario O.C.D., O cardinal Leme (1882-1942), Rio de Janeiro, Livraria José Olympio, 1962.
4. On Jackson de Figuereido (1891-1928), cf. Francisco Iglesias, Estudo sobre o pensamento reacionário: Jackson de Figuereido, in Historia e Ideologia, (São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1981), pp. 108-58; Cléa de Figuereido Fernandes, Jackson de Figuereido, uma trajetória apaixonada, Rio de Janeiro s.d., Editora Forense Universitária (ma 1987-8); Antonío Carlos Villaça, in O pensamento católico no Brasil, (Rio de Janeiro, Zahar Editores, 1975) calls him “an agitator of ideas” (p. 11) who “personified, in Brazil, the thinking of Joseph de Maistre” (p. 12). On the tenth anniversary of his death, in number 321 of O Legionário (5 November 1938), Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira dedicated an article to Jackson de Figuereido (A Dynamite de Christo) and an entire page with writings of Father Ascanio Brandão and of Alceu Amoroso Lima. On ultramontane Catholicism in Brazil cf. also Riolando Azzi, O altar unido ao trono. Um projeto conservador, São Paulo, Edições Paulinas, 1992; Tiago Adão Lara, Tradicionalismo católico em Pernambuco, Recife, Edições Massangana, 1988.
5. Vital Maria Gonçalves de Oliveira was born on 27 November 1844 in Pedras de Fogo (Pernambuco) and studied in the seminaries of Olinda and Saint-Sulpice in Paris. On 16 July 1863 he entered the Capuchin Order with the name of Friar Vital Maria de Pernambuco. On 2 August of the same year he was ordained to the priesthood in Paris, and in the month of November he returned to Brazil, where he taught philosophy in the seminary of São Paulo. At the suggestion of the Emperor Dom Pedro II, on 17 March 1872 he was consecrated bishop of Olinda in the cathedral of São Paulo. Violently attacked by a calumnious campaign promoted by the Masonic Lodges, in 1874 he was arrested and condemned by the government of the viscount of Rio Branco. After the pardon granted to him the following year, he went to Rome to clarify his behaviour to Pius IX, who had heard many slanders. He died in Paris on 4 July 1878 under mysterious circumstances which led one to believe that he had been poisoned. In 1882 his remains were transferred to Brazil and interred in the Basilica of Penha in Recife. The cause for his beatification, begun in 1953, was reopened in 1995 following the nihil obstat of the Holy See. Cf. Antonio Manoel dos Reis, O Bispo de Olinda D. Frei Vital Maria Gonçalves de Oliveira perante a História, Rio de Janeiro, Typographia da Gazeta de Noticias, 1878; F. Louis de Gonzague O.M.C., Une page de l’histoire du Brésil, Monseigneur Vital, Paris, Librairie Saint-François, 1912; Fr. Felix de Olivola, Um grande brasileiro. D. Frei Vital Maria Gonçalves de Oliveira, Bispo de Olinda, 3rd edn., Recife, Imprensa Industrial, 1937; Ramos de Oliveira, O conflito Maçônico-Religioso de 1872, Petropolis, Editora Vozes, 1952.
Between August and September 1944, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira dedicated a series of five articles in “O Legionário” to Dom Vital. “In the religious life of the Brazilian people, the name of Dom Vital was like a great beam of light. He symbolised intrepid Faith, apostolic courage, unbreakable coherence of life with the doctrine, of action with thought, all at the service of Holy Mother Church”. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “7 dias em Revista”, O Legionário, no. 587, 7 November 1943.
6. A. M. dos Reis, O Bispo de Olinda, p. IV.
7. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Mais um anniversario”, O Legionário, no. 373, 5 November 1939.
8. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, A Dynamite de Christo.
9. The Marian Congregations were established and promoted by the Society of Jesus, with the aim of forming select Christians, whatever their state and devotion. In the golden book of the Congregations we find saints such as Francis of Sales, Alphonsus de Liguori, Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, and courageous defenders of Christian civilization such as John of Austria, John Sobieski, Gabriel Garcia Moreno. The first Marian Congregation in Brazil, after the return of the Company of Jesus, was established on 31 May 1870. Between 1870 and 1928 over 250 Congregations were founded. At the end of 1927, in São Paulo, the First Diocesan Federation for co-ordinating and guiding the Marian Congregations was founded. In 1930, Father Irineu Cursino de Moura was placed at its head. Pedro Américo Maia S.J., História das Congregações Marianas no Brasil, São Paulo, Edições Loyola,1992. Cf. also Clemente Espinosa S.J., Magisterio Pontificio sobre las Congregaciones Marianas, 2nd edn., Bilbao, El Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús, 1965.
10. Archbishop Duarte Leopoldo e Silva was born in Taubaté, in the state of São Paulo, on 4 April Having been ordained to the priesthood in October 1892, in 1894 he became parish priest of the Church of Saint Cecília in São Paulo. He received his Episcopal consecration from St Pius X in Rome in May 1904; he was appointed bishop of Curitiba in October of the same year. In December 1906 he was transferred to the diocese of São Paulo, to replace the bishop, José de Camargo Barros, who had died in a shipwreck. He was then made archbishop, on 7 June 1908, after the establishment of the new archdiocese for São Paulo. For his merits, he received from the Holy See the titles of Roman count, assistant to the papal throne, Domestic Prelate of His Holiness. He governed the archdiocese until the day of his death 13 November 1938. From the very beginning of his episcopate, he wished to represent in a symbol the great mission of the Paulista people entrusted to him: he did this by erecting a new cathedral in São Paulo, that would be “a school of art and a stimulus to the most noble and elevated thoughts, (…) an opulent cathedral that, by bearing witness to the abundance of our material resources, will be a hymn of thanksgiving to God Our Lord”. In Arruda Dantas, Dom Duarte Leopoldo, (São Paulo, Sociedade Impressora Pannartz, 1974), p. 42. The new cathedral of São Paulo was only inaugurated in 1954. Cf. Sonia Dias, Sérgio Flaksman, Silva, Duarte Leopoldo e, in DHBB, vol. IV, pp. 3150-1. Cf. also the volume that contains his writings and his speeches Pastoraes, São Paulo, Escolas Profissionaes do Lyceu Salesiano S. Coracão de Jesus, 1921, and the biographical essay by Júlio Rodrigues, D. Duarte Leopoldo e Silva, arcebispo de São Paulo. Homenagem do Cléro e dos Catholicos da Archidiocése, por occasião do Jubileu de sua Sagração Episcopal, São Paulo, Instituto D. Anna Rosa, 1929. Cf. also P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “Um bispo providencial”, O Legionário, no. 323, 20 November 1938; “O grande Dom Duarte”, O Legionário, no. 374, 12 November 1939; “Dom Duarte”, O Legionário, no. 535, 8 November 1942 and the memoir that he wrote in “Junto à sepultura do nosso grande Cardeal”, O Legionário, no. 533, 25 October 1942.
11. Benedetto Aloisi Masella was born in Pontecorvo on 29 June 1879, of a noble family that had already given one cardinal to the Church. He died in Rome on 1 October 1970. Ordained to the priesthood in 1902, after having studied in the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy he was secretary and regent of the Nunciature in Lisbon (1905-08), apostolic nuncio in Chile (1919-26) and Brazil (1927-46) until he was promoted to cardinal. Suburbicarian Bishop of Palestrina, Cardinal in 1946, Prefect of the Holy Congregation of the Sacraments, dean of the Lateran Basilica, Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church during the vacant Papal Sees of the pontificates of Pius XII and of John XXIII. He participated actively in the preparation of the Council and was nominated pontifical legate for the crowning of Our Lady of Fatima in 1946.
12. Paulo Marcondes Pedrosa was born in São Bento do Sapucái (SP) on 6 November 1881 and died in São Paulo on 29 April Ordained priest in 1904, he was coadjutor, then parish priest until 1932 of the Church of St Cecilia, monsignor and Papal Chamberlain on 21 April 1920. On 27 April 1932 he entered the Benedictine Order in the monastery of São Bento, of which he was prior.
13. On Father Leonel Franca S.J. (1893-1948), considered by many to be the “spiritual father” of the Brazilian intelligentsia of this period, cf. Luiz Gonzaga da Silveira d’Elboux S.J., O Padre Leonel Franca S.J., (Rio de Janeiro, Livraria Agir Editora, 1953), p. 173; Heliodoro Pires, “Leonel Franca, apóstolo do Brasil moderno”, Revista Eclesiastica Brasileira, 1953, vol. 13, pp. 911-21. Father Franca, whose Obras completas are contained in fifteen volumes, is the author of essays such as “A Igreja, a Reforma e a Civilização” (1922) and “A crise do mundo moderno” (1940) which are original reflections on the crisis of our time in the light of Catholic doctrine. He founded and directed for eight years the Catholic University of Rio, the first in Brazil. “Pedagogue, apologist, spiritual director, he dedicated his life to the History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History.” C. Villaça, O pensamento católico no Brasil, op. cit., p. 124.
14. O Legionário, no. 70, 14 December 1930.
15. This title is frequently used in Brazil, just as in other European countries, where the title of “doctor” is given to all those who have received a degree. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira began his public life immediately after obtaining his degree, before becoming a congressman and a university professor. He, then, began to be known as “Doctor Plinio” which since then became incorporated into his name, as is the custom in Brazil.